


hollow

by togglemaps



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Droughtjoy 2017, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trauma, theon greyjoy is a sass machine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 14:29:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12134472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togglemaps/pseuds/togglemaps
Summary: Written for Droughtjoy2017, finally getting around to posting it on here.Dragonstone was the strangest place Theon had ever been.





	hollow

**Author's Note:**

> CW for the regular Theon stuff, so body mutilation, self loathing, trauma, PTSD. Some other things I’m sure. Unbeta'd, so. Waves hand through the air.

Dragonstone was the strangest place Theon had ever been. Pyke had been even windier and colder; Winterfell, with it’s hot springs piped through the walls, warmer and older.

It hadn’t taken him long to understand that there was something unnatural about Dragonstone. The Valyrians had power that the rest of the world had never managed to master and Theon felt it keenly. There were no drafts, no crumbling stone that needed upkeep, even sitting beside a window high up in one of the towers Theon couldn’t feel the chill trying to leech through the old, slightly warped glass.

It should have needed replacing long ago but, pressing the back of his hand against the glass, he knew it had never happened. The glass was as old as the castle, more than 600 years old, made by a people almost extinct with techniques long since lost.

One felt oddly mortal, sitting in a castle made by Valyrian magic.

“The rookery,” Jon Snow said, voice harsh and hard. “Where is it?”

“Further up,” Theon said, not turning his eyes away from the sea. “At the very top.” _Where rookeries always are,_ he thought. _Why are you bothering me?_

Jon stepped further into the room, where Theon could spy him from the corner of his eye. “What is this place?” Jon asked, staring at the massive dragon set into the stone of the rooms walls, it’s body going all the way around the wall with the dragons tail only inches from it’s snoot.

“Maester Pycel thinks it might have been the workroom of some kind of sorcerer in ages past,” Theon said. He could feel the moment Jon’s gaze landed directly on him, feel the fire of his rage in the way all the hair on Theon’s forearms rose to attention.

He should have closed the door. Rooms felt so much smaller now though, and a closed door so often made a room feel like a prison.

“You’re different than I remember you.” Jon’s voice was harsh, and had a mocking edge that ill suited him.

 _And you’re not different at all,_ Theon thought. _Same sullen, angry boy as ever. Not even any taller than you were then._ Theon had never lost a war of words with Jon Snow, but that had been the Theon of before and if the words still sprang to mind, they almost never passed his lips. Ramsey had liked his japes even less than Jon. “I know,” he said.

“You’re a traitor,” Jon said. “Why anyone would include you amongst their allies I don’t know.”

 _And you’re a sworn man of the Night’s Watch, yet you stand here a king. An oathbreaker._ There was no point in even thinking of discussing it with him. Jon Snow had as little interest in the why’s of his choices as anyone, and wasn’t a person Theon would have confided in even if Jon had wanted to know.

“ _Look at me,_ ” Jon said, almost a yell, his voice shaking just a little.

Theon didn’t want to, wanted to pretend that Jon Snow hadn’t invaded this place he’d found where no one ever bothered him except for, very occasionally, the Maester. He turned to look in Jon’s direction, staring over his shoulder and through the open door. It all felt too familiar, fear beginning to narrow his thoughts and sharpen his vision, his breath coming quicker as all his muscles tensed.

“You should be dead,” Jon said.

He stood, looked Jon in the eye and said, calmly as he could manage, “There are worse things than dying.” Jon was pale and stricken when Theon pushed past him, a bit of his old bravado raring up inside him, and started the long walk down the stairs. At the bottom, his bad foot was throbbing and a headache was building up around his right eye.

The queen had bid him to wait, and so he waited. He watched Jon and his men leave Dragonstone, watched the queen leave on her dragons, resented all these things that weren’t saving Yara.

Maybe all that had happened to him, all that he’d done, was so that he’d be here in this moment, the man he needed to be to want to save Yara, to be willing to risk all to save her. What did it matter though, if nobody else was willing to risk anything? If he weren’t the sort of man who could make people willing to risk anything?

What was he if he couldn’t save her? Nothing. Or something, maybe. Surely something. Even a newborn babe was something.

Ramsay was dead. He would never be made to be Reek again by anything except the twisted and tangled traps of his own mind. The longer he waited, the more tangled his mind became, the more he thought and thought and thought and thought about everything that Euron might be doing to Yara, of everything Cercei Lannister might be doing to Yara, of every unhappy ending this thing could have.

It was impossible to think of anything else, except when he thought of Robb and Sansa and Winterfell.

He walked down to the shore, took off his shoes and rolled up his pants to above his knee and waded into the water. His foot, scarred from where the stake had pierced it, was an awful sight—he had seen men, hard men, turn away at the sight of it more than once. His calves weren’t much better, a mess of flaying scars that made him ache to look upon them.

He had been a handsome man once. Now, his body looked like something out of a story Old Nan would have told to scare the children.

He pushed it aside. That other man, he was dead and maybe it was all the better for it. If there was a god it cared nothing for him, but he had come here to pray and so he prayed anyway. _What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger,_ he thought. _Drowned god, I was dead and now I live, make me hard and strong so that I might save my sister. If there is any amongst us you must love, it is her, surely._

 _Bless her with salt, bless her with stone, bless her with steel. Please, please, please._ He listened to the sea, tried to hear the drowned god speak the way the priests claimed they could, but he could hear nothing but the waves and the wind.


End file.
